I’ve done lots of tech projects within the retail energy industry in Texas - this is the right answer.

To expand a little bit:

Retail energy providers (REPs), like NRG, ClearSky, Just Energy, etc. make their money by forecasting the amount of energy that will be needed as far in advance as possible and purchasing that amount from power generators like CenterPoint and marking it up a few cents. The farther out, the cheaper they can get it. I’ve helped build forecasting engines for a few that ingest historical usage data from meters (all meters in Texas are smart meters), weather data, and others to use machine learning to forecast how much individuals will need and aggregate it together to help the energy traders make better informed trade decisions farther out.

If they mess up or an unforeseen event happens and they don’t have enough energy bought for that time segment (forgot the term for a window of time they use), they have to go to the spot market which is where the prices fluctuate and can be many many multitudes higher than the rate the customers are contracted to pay.

In a storm scenario or a freeze, it can be thousands of times more expensive because demand is so high and supply is so limited. This is when REPs go bankrupt if they don’t have the cash on hand.

There are also insurance plans that the REPs pay for that cover very specific conditions for different types of events or outages that can kick in to cover the huge costs they would otherwise incur on their own buying electricity at that spot rate. I’ve known a few that were only able to stay operating because someone a few years prior had bought an insurance policy that covered said weather event.

Griddy died because of the ice storm in Texas a few years ago and the huge costs people incurred. I actually met with their CIO the year prior as part of a technology assessment of their stack. Nice guy.

Edit: also you can largely thank Enron and Rick Perry for deregulating Texas’ energy - which directly led to the terrible “performance” of the Texas grid during the winter storm Uri in 2021. Same for Enron in the constant blackouts in California in the early 2000’s.

Where does online sports “betting” fit into this meme? Genuine ask because I have no experience or awareness of online casinos. Thanks.

I think I’d still rather type out internationalization even if it doesn’t fit on a slide lol.

I thought the same until the barbarians came @me with O11y and one of my coworkers asked where the f they got “oh eleveny” from.

I just thought 8 = netes.

They’re shorthand for long words you don’t want to type. You keep the first and last letter and replace the rest of the word with the number of characters you removed.

Kubernetes ➡️ K8s Observability ➡️ O11y

🤷🏼‍♂️

Rolling onto a client that uses “O11y” for observability almost gave me permanent damage.

Hwat?

Fucking ouch to read.

Damn you’re unionized IT? Where are you general located?

I don’t disagree with the sentiment but the Ilyushin Il-76 is made by Ilyushin, not Boeing. Let’s not cross the streams incorrectly.

Gah he looks worse than usual in this shot.

Whyyyyy would you actually say this out loud? We all know it’s a dick move but I’m curious what would possess them to actually broadcast it? Like you’re not supposed say the quiet parts out loud. Right?

You don’t sayyyyy

Okay yeah that’s true. I should have been cognizant that not being economically viable / efficient enough does not mean it’s impossible/I don’t believe it’s real. Definitely works.

Carbon capture 🥀

I feel seen.

The amount of people in here that are familiar with the wilderness and survival saying a week or “not long” is sobering… 😐

What are you talking about? I work in cloud and fiber infrastructure - the major players pay for fiber connections and close proximity to their customers.

ISPs have an obligation to their customers to provide a service at the speed their customer is paying for - regardless of what is coming down the pipe.

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What was this? I didn’t catch it